Heinrich Himmler: The SS, Gestapo, His Life and Career

VII. Slave of Power

News of the Allied landings in Normandy in the small hours of the morning of 6 June, two days after the liberation of Rome, came as a surprise to the Nazi leaders. Hitler was in Berchtesgaden, and Rommel, who was in command of the Army Group controlling Holland, Belgium and Northern France, was spending the night at his home in Ulm. Goring was resting at Veldenstein, one of his castles in the south, when he received the telephone call from his aide Brauchitsch that hurried him by road to a situation conference held during the afternoon at Klessheim, a baroque palace near Salzburg where Hitler had acted as host to Mussolini and Ciano in 1942, and bullied Horthy in 1944. The conference was attended by Himmler, who came from his special train stationed near Berchtesgaden which he was using as his headquarters during the times Hitler was on the Obersalzburg, while Ribbentrop travelled from Fuschl, his summer palace near Salzburg where, according to Schellenberg, he had been brooding on the idea of shooting Stalin with a revolver disguised as a fountain-pen. Meanwhile, Hitler had gone to bed after hearing the news from France, leaving an order that he was not to be disturbed.

No record survives of what Himmler, Goring and Ribbentrop discussed at this meeting. Only the circumstance of an invasion could have brought these three together without the master-presence of Hitler, who did not emerge from his retirement to face his generals in France until 17 June, when he summoned Rundstedt and Rommel to a conference at Margival, near Soissons, the day after the first V-weapon had been launched against London. According to General Speidel who was present, Hitler looked ‘pale and sleepless’; his restless fingers played with coloured pencils and, when they ate, he swallowed a sequence of pills and medicines after bolting down a plate of rice and vegetables. He broke his promise to visit Rommel’s Group headquarters two days later, returning to Berchtesgaden the same night that a stray V-bomb turned off course to London and exploded near his bunker. Instead, he received Rundstedt and Rommel on the Obersalzburg on 29 June, a week after the Russians had begun their major offensive; he rejected their appeal to end the war and lectured them on his miracle weapon. On 1 July Rundstedt was replaced by Kluge. Rommel, left alone, warned Hitler in a letter dated 15 July that defeat in France was now inevitable; two days later he was severely wounded in his staff car by a low-flying aircraft.

The situation could scarcely be worse on both fronts. By early July the Russians had reached Polish territory and were threatening East Prussia. Himmler continued in the south, where Hitler remained brooding until 14 July, when he transferred his headquarters to the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Himmler followed him north, but was not present at his first staff conference on 15 July, the day Hitler authorized him to form fifteen new S.S. divisions to replace the losses on the Eastern front, an order that in fact anticipated by five days his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, a post from which General Fromm was to be dismissed on 20 July. It was here, too, on 20 July that the group of senior officers in the Reserve Army almost succeeded in killing Hitler at his mid-day conference and achieving a coup d’état in Germany.¹

A briefcase holding a time-bomb was planted by Colonel the Count von Stauffenberg, Fromm’s Chief of Staff, under the Führer’s conference-table. At 12.42 the bomb exploded, ten minutes after Stauffenberg had broken the capsule holding the acid which ate through the wire controlling the firing-pin. But the briefcase under the table had been inadvertently pushed by another officer to a position which shielded Hitler from the worst effects of the blast. Two minutes later Stauffenberg passed successfully through the first check-point at Rastenburg on his way to the aircraft which was to fly him back to his fellow-conspirators at the Bendlerstrasse, the War Office in Berlin. He believed Hitler was dead.

Neither Himmler, Goring nor Ribbentrop were at the conference at the time of the explosion, and Goebbels was in Berlin. Goring was at his headquarters fifty miles away. Himmler’s centre in East Prussia was the villa Hagewald-Hochwald, at Birkenwald, on the Maursee lake; his official train was stationed nearby. Kersten had given him treatment during the morning; Himmler told him that he believed the whole course of the war would be affected by the troubles developing between the Americans and the Russians. Kersten then went for a long walk, lunched in the peaceful setting of the villa and later slept in his compartment on the train.

Himmler was at Birkenwald at the time of the explosion; he was summoned immediately by ’phone, and his bodyguard Kiermaier remembers the rough journey they made at speed over the uneven country roads, covering the twenty-five kilometres in about half an hour.

It had been arranged that General Fellgiebel, the Army Chief of Signals, who was one of the conspirators, should send a signal in code to the generals at Army headquarters at the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin immediately after Hitler’s death, so that the complex operation of the coup d’état could be put in motion; after this he was to sever Rastenburg’s communications with the outside world for as long as he could. After seeing the bomb explode, Stauffenberg had jumped into his car and left for the airport in the full belief that Hitler was dead. But a few moments later Hitler, Keitel and the other survivors emerged dazed, shocked and wounded from the shattered building, and Fellgiebel, not knowing what to do for the best, joined the running men who rushed to help the Führer and tend the injured officers. By Hitler’s express orders no news of the explosion was to be given to the outside world, and the S.S. took charge of the area. Fellgiebel found it impossible to report what had happened to the Bendlerstrasse.

The conspirators were left without news of any kind until 3.30 in the afternoon, when Thiele, Chief of Signals at the Bendlerstrasse, managed to get a vague message from Rastenburg that the attempt had taken place. The measures for the coup d’état under the code name Valkyrie were put into operation. Meanwhile Stauffenberg had been flying back to Berlin confident that his great mission had at last been accomplished.

Himmler arrived at Rastenburg shortly after 1.15 and took immediate action. He telephoned Gestapo headquarters in Berlin and ordered a posse of police investigators to fly at once to Rastenburg. After this it appears that communications with Berlin were shut down by order of Hitler until round 3.30, the time when Thiele managed to telephone from the Bendlerstrasse. Shortly after this, Keitel was able to inform Fromm that Hitler was not dead. Fromm immediately attempted to cancel the Valkyrie operations that the conspirators had launched in his name as Commander-in-Chief. This was too much for the conspirators, and they placed him under arrest. At Rastenburg, Himmler had by now traced the origin of the bomb to Stauffenburg. He telephoned Berlin, where Stauffenburg had landed about 3.45, to order the Count’s arrest either at the airport or the Bendlerstrasse, but the S.S. Colonel who drove to the Bendlerstrasse at 5.30 with two subordinates to carry out the order only found that it was he himself who was put under arrest.

Himmler still believed that he was dealing with an attempt on Hitler’s life by an isolated man or at most by a small group in the resistance; he did not yet realize that a military coup d’état was actually in operation in Berlin. Had he done so, he would not have accompanied Hitler to meet the train bringing Mussolini on a visit to Rastenburg, which it seemed to Hitler unnecessary to postpone. Indeed, he needed an audience to whom he might boast of the special ‘Providence’ that had in its wisdom seen fit to preserve him, even though the audience was only an aged and fallen führer on whom the same Providence had evidently ceased to smile. With Himmler still in anxious attendance, Hitler and Mussolini stared wonderingly at the wrecked conference room which the bomb had destroyed, and it seemed that a miracle had manifestly occurred. Himmler asserted later that his re-conversion to belief in God happened at this moment.²

Now that communications with Berlin had been restored, it was soon realized that a major upheaval was taking place in the capital. Before taking tea with Mussolini and the remaining Nazi leaders at five o‘clock, Hitler ordered Himmler to fly at once to Berlin. With a sudden burst of decision he gave the faithful Reichsführer S.S. formal control of the security of the Reich and made him Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army in the place of Fromm. This gave Himmler what he most desired, direct access to the Bendlerstrasse and a command at last in the Army itself. His last words to Hitler were overheard: ‘My Führer,’ he said, ‘you can leave it all to me.’

Nevertheless, he moved with pronounced caution for a keen soldier sent on an urgent and dangerous mission. While Hitler entertained his guests at what proved to be a socially disastrous tea-party, Himmler returned to Birkenwald before leaving for Berlin. Kersten was wakened from his long afternoon nap by Himmler’s driver bursting in on him with the news from Rastenburg; he got up at once and hurried to Himmler’s study in the villa, where he found him sorting and destroying certain papers. ‘Now my hour has come’, said Himmler. ‘I’ll round up all that reactionary gang; I’ve already given orders for the arrest of the traitors. By preserving the Führer, Providence has given us a sign. I am flying immediately to Berlin.’

When he eventually reached Berlin late that evening after landing at a remote airport, he was far too wary to go to the Bendlerstrasse, the headquarters of his new command. He went straight to Goebbels who, as the senior Nazi Minister in Berlin, had been taking vigorous action against the conspirators ever since he had learned the truth of the situation in Rastenburg. In his dealings with the unit of the Berlin Guards Regiment initially detailed under the command of Major Remer, an ardent Nazi, to arrest him, he reversed the whole situation and put Remer on the telephone to Hitler. Hitler promoted Remer a Colonel for his loyalty and placed the safety of Berlin in his charge. He told him to obey only Goebbels and Himmler, his new Commander-in-Chief who was at that moment on his way to Berlin. Meanwhile, following Hitler’s instructions, Goebbels had arranged for a preliminary announcement of the Führer’s survival to be broadcast at 6.30, and two hours later Keitel sent a teleprinter to all Army Commands announcing Himmler’s appointment and insisting that only commands issued with the authority of the Führer or Himmler were to be obeyed. Stauffenberg, who was valiantly trying to maintain the coup d’état at the Bendlerstrasse by teleprinter and telephone, gradually found the wind stolen from his sails. Only in France and Austria were active steps taken to join in the coup d’état. The conspiracy had been a valiant effort on his part and that of General Olbricht, Fromm’s Head of Army Supplies. At nine o’clock it was announced on the radio that Hitler would speak to his people later that night.

So by the time Himmler reached the centre of Berlin from the airport, the essential danger was over. He was forced, however, to arrange for Hitler to countermand a number of hysterical instructions sent by Bormann to the Gauleiters, ordering them to arrest the Army commanders in their areas. When a commando unit under Skorzeny finally reached the Bendlerstrasse around midnight, they found that Fromm, having been freed to resume his command, had held a summary court-martial of the men who earlier in the day had arrested him, and that Beck, Olbricht and Stauffenberg, together with certain others of the inner corps of conspirators had already been shot or forced to commit suicide. Skorzeny forbade any further executions, in the name of Himmler, the new Commander-in-Chief.

Himmler meanwhile had set up his own court of enquiry at Goebbels’s official residence in the Hermann Goring Strasse. Together the two Ministers examined the men brought before them by the S.S., including Fromm himself. The interrogation went on throughout the night, broken only by the need to listen to Hitler’s speech on the radio, which was broadcast at one o’clock in the morning. Goebbels was furious at the wording of this statement, which Hitler delivered in a harsh and weary voice, vowing brutal vengeance on the men who had betrayed him.

The following day Bormann was forced to rectify his error of the night before and transmit less ambiguous instructions which supported Himmler’s new authority. Kaltenbrunner was empowered by Himmler to take charge of the interrogations that followed in preparation for the first phase of the trials which began on 7 August in the Peoples’ Court. Roland Freisler, President of the Court, controlled the proceedings, and the first group of conspirators, tortured, unshaven and dressed in old and ill-fitting civilian clothes, were pressed into the courtroom for an examination which was designed to degrade them before the film cameras set up to record their trial by order of a Führer obsessed by the need for vengeance. Beck, Olbricht and Stauffenberg, the leaders of the conspiracy, were mercifully dead; but their seconds in the courtroom, including Field-Marshal von Witzleben, who was pushed forward to face Freisler’s vicious ridicule in unbraced trousers, the Generals Hoepner and Stieff, and Stauffenberg’s cousin, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, were examined in turn and then condemned to hang naked before the recording lens of a film camera; each of them was strangled by a loop of piano wire suspended from a meat hook. They died on 8 August one by one in the confined space of a small room in the Plötzensee Prison, and it is said some of the men executed hung struggling for five minutes on end before their agony ceased. Hitler watched the record of the executions that night in the projection room at the Reich Chancellery; even Goebbels, hardened as he was, could not look at such fearful suffering. All the prints of this film were subsequently destroyed.

From the point of view of Himmler and his agent Kaltenbrunner, preparation for the trials represented a prolonged series of interrogations that lasted throughout the final months of the war. These interrogations led to more and more arrests and executions; the final death-roll will never now be known, though the number rose into the hundreds.³ The victims included many of the most distinguished members of the resistance, some of them kept alive until the last few days of the war and then killed in the very face of liberation because their tragic testimony would have added weight to the overburdened guilt of the Nazis.

Von Hassell was hanged on 8 September 1944, Langbehn executed on 12 October, Popitz hanged on 2 February 1945, Nebe of the S.S. executed on 3 March. Rommel, Hitler’s and Germany’s ideal general, was compelled to commit suicide on 14 October. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed on 9 April, the same day as Admiral Canaris.

Himmler made his first public comment on the events of 20 July in an address to a group of Gauleiters and other officials assembled at Posen on 3 August; both Bormann and Goebbels were present. He spoke with a scathing, self-protecting irony of what had happened between himself, Langbehn, whom he called the middleman, and Popitz:

He had told Hitler of the matter, and they had laughed together; the appointment with Popitz, however, had not been very revealing. So Langbehn was arrested:

Himmler, as might be expected, poured ridicule on the whole civilian part in the conspiracy, from Langbehn and Popitz to Kiep and the Solfs. ‘We knew about the present conspiracy for a very long time’, he said. As for the generals, he was equally scathing, ‘Fromm’, he declared, ‘acted like a vulgar film scenario’, and he made the whole Army seem responsible for the conspiracy. He claimed that Stauffenberg was preparing to loose the inmates of the concentration camps upon the people of Germany. ‘It meant that in the next two or three weeks crime would blossom and the communists would reign over our streets.’⁵

These words were meant for public hearing. In private, Himmler was most careful to ensure that the trial of Langbehn and Popitz was kept as secret as possible. When the hearing occurred in the autumn, Kaltenbrunner sent a letter to the Minister of Justice:

Though both Langbehn and Popitz were condemned to death, Popitz was kept alive until the following February in case more information could be got from him. Langbehn, as we have seen, died in October; he was tortured before the death sentence was carried out.

In his talk to the Gauleiters and other high officials at Posen, on 29 May 1944, Himmler was unusually direct in his reference to the Judenfrage, the Jewish problem. He adopted the frank manner of speech he favoured with his more intimate audiences, the audiences in fact that he most enjoyed addressing. Extermination, he explained, was a hard and difficult operation:

He promised the Gauleiters, whom he called ‘the supreme dignitaries of the Party, of this political Order of ours’, that ‘before the end of the year the Jew problem will be settled once and for all.’ He concluded:

Nineteen forty-four was the year in which Himmler established his highest prestige with Hitler and finally won from him a command on the battlefield in addition to control of the Reserve Army and the Waffen S.S. Yet he was realistic enough at the same time to modify his position over the Jews. There were many practical reasons for this. The machinery of slaughter was becoming increasingly difficult to operate now that the adversities of war were gathering momentum. By the spring of 1944 it was conceivable that areas such as Auschwitz might eventually be overrun by the enemy; with the heavy losses of men and equipment the attempts to mobilize the labour of the prisoners became more urgent. At the same time, an increasing pressure was being brought to bear on Himmler to relent, and this matched a growing fear in his own mind that the revulsion of the world outside Germany to the genocide associated most directly with his name would tell against him if he were ever able to put himself forward as Germany’s negotiator with the Allies in the West.

Himmler never understood the nature of the abhorrence in which his name was held, nor realized the extent of it. He believed that a few apparent gestures of goodwill would be sufficient to re-establish his unfortunate reputation in the West, though the announcements made in America during the summer that there would be trials for war crimes once hostilities were over must have reached his ears.

Himmler began to think again. The constant humanizing influence of Kersten and the intrigues of Schellenberg designed to edge his master into becoming a peace negotiator, combined to make Himmler retreat to some extent from the absolute position he had held in 1943. The first change of policy was, as we have seen, second only to genocide itself in its inhumanity — extermination of unwanted peoples through work. Then came the attempted sale of certain Jews, negotiated on the one side in order to save lives and on the other to gain either money or commodities useful for the war.⁷ The first important negotiations of this kind were those undertaken by Yoel Brand on behalf of the Hungarian Jews, whom the Nazis had finally succeeded in adding to their victims in 1943. In May 1944 Eichmann offered Brand the lives of 700,000 Hungarian Jews in exchange for 10,000 lorries which the Allies were to deliver to Salonika; this was the first form of barter to be suggested and came to nothing. It was to be followed by other proposals equally appalling, such as Eichmann’s subsequent offer on behalf of Himmler to receive 20 million Swiss francs for the lives and liberties of 30,000 Jews. This last proposal led to the actual transfer of 1,684 Rumanian Jews, who reached Switzerland in August and December 1944, and a further 1,000 Hungarian Jews the following February, for all of whom Himmler received through the Swiss President, Jean-Marie Musi, 5 million Swiss francs subscribed through international Jewish charity. These developments were assisted by the proposals Himmler received from a Madame Immfeld to settle liberated Jews in the South of France. The negotiations for the transfer of the money were most complicated and were in fact hindered by the action of the U.S. State Department. Information about this pitiful sale was eventually to reach the ears of Hitler. But by this time, as we shall see, Himmler was deeply involved in negotiations with the Red Cross.

Schellenberg, having reached that stage in his post-war memoirs when he was most determined to promote himself as the humane peace negotiator, describes in some detail how he brought Musi and Himmler together on a number of occasions during the winter of 1944—5. At the first of these meetings, Musi persuaded Himmler to accept money instead of equipment and medicines, while at a second conference, which Schellenberg says took place on 12 January in the Black Forest, the following terms were agreed:

This was the plan that led to the dispute with Hitler, which Schellenberg claims was deliberately fostered by Kaltenbrunner: ‘Hitler immediately issued two orders: that any German who helped a Jew, or a British or an American prisoner to escape would be executed instantly.’

Hitler summoned Himmler, told him what he thought of his action in terms that Himmler was never to forget and, according to Kurt Becher, Himmler’s agent in the commercial negotiations over the Jews, gave his notorious order that ‘no camp inmate in the southern half of Germany must fall into enemy hands alive’.⁹

Meanwhile, with Hungary in the autumn on the eve of capitulation to Russia, the deportations began once more. Himmler employed Hoess, now Deputy-Inspector of Concentration Camps, to act as one of the supervisors who were supposed to ensure reasonable humanity. Budapest fell in December with a considerable Jewish population still left there alive.¹⁰ Himmler had permitted an International Red Cross Mission to make a highly restricted inspection of Auschwitz in September, and in October and November there is evidence that he was trying to halt the massacres, or at any rate shift the responsibility for them onto the shoulders of his subordinates. He began, according to Becher, by issuing an order to Pohl and Kaltenbrunner ‘between the middle of September and the middle of October’: ‘By this order, which becomes immediately operative, I forbid any liquidation of Jews and order that on the contrary, care should be given to weak and sick persons. I hold you personally responsible even if this order should be not strictly adhered to by the subordinate officers.’¹¹ This was followed on 26 November by an order which Becher is also responsible for recording: ‘The crematoria at Auschwitz are to be dismantled, the Jews working in the Reich are to get normal Eastern workers’ rations. In the absence of Jewish hospitals they may be treated with Aryan patients.’

The Red Army were not to reach Auschwitz and its associate camps until the end of January 1945; when they arrived they found that the evacuation of the vast body of prisoners to the west, which had begun as early as the previous September, had been all but completed, and there were less than 3,000 invalids left for them to tend. According to Reitlinger, the central camps and their satellites inside Germany numbered over a hundred at the beginning of 1945, and still held, in conditions which were now deteriorating beyond all control, 500,000 ‘Aryans’ and 200,000 Jews. Their fate remained now in the balance; Himmler wanted to use them as his bargaining point with the Allies, while Hitler and Kaltenbrunner seemed equally determined they should die before there was any chance of their final liberation.

Himmler had always covered his weakness of character and indecision by assuming a mask of strength. The rank and uniform of an Army Commander fulfilled his need to prove to himself that he was a resolute man of action. Just as he had forced his inadequate body to reach the required standard in athletics, he braced himself now to become a general in the field of battle.

He was completely unsuited either in mind or body for such a task. But he had a purblind faith in himself, and the doubts that always welled up from hidden sources in his mind and conscience were quelled by his able advisers. If Kersten was at his side to convince him of his humanity and Schellenberg always ready to persuade him he was a diplomat, Skorzeny, the genius in commando tactics, was there in his service to make him feel a general. His instinctive need was to compensate for anything that might go wrong — the death or derangement of Hitler, the machination of the generals, the collapse of the German Army, the chicanery of Goebbels or of Goring, the uncertain powers of Bormann as the controller of Hitler’s court; he tried to allow for everything in the process of keeping himself at the centre of the spiders’ web of Nazi intrigue. No wonder his head ached and the nerves of his stomach were knotted with cramp. But Kersten was there to relieve him. In the Nazi hierarchy, the man whom Germany feared most after Hitler was himself the greatest victim of chronic doubts and fears.

At this moment he needed the reassurance of some new and active occupation which would release him from the constraint of his own nature. He would become a field commander. In July, as we have seen, Hitler in a moment of great national insecurity had impulsively given him the doubtful command of the Reserve Army, a melting-pot of units mainly composed of the older age-groups still in uniform, of men who had been wounded but not released from service and army trainees who had never seen action at all. For Himmler command of such forces spread over Germany was a beginning but not an end. He needed far more than this to consolidate his power and secure his ego. Nevertheless, he set out to make the men of his new command observers of National Socialism by increasing the number of National Socialist Control Officers, and he initiated new Army divisions to be called by such names as the Peoples’ Grenadiers (Volksgrenadier) and the Peoples’ Artillery (Volksartillerie ).

The Party Control Officers, of whom Lieutenant Hagen had proved so notable an example when he had brought the Bendlerstrasse conspiracy to Goebbels’ notice on 20 July, were in effect commissars attached to the Army to ensure the political education of the men. Himmler addressed a group of these political commissars a few days after the attempt, spurring them on to take violent action against all defeatists and deserters: ‘I give you the authority to seize every man who turns back, if necessary to tie him up and throw him on a supply wagon… Put the best, the most energetic and the most brutal officer of the division in charge. They will soon round up such rabble. They will put up against a wall anyone who answers back.’¹² Such talk as this prepared Himmler to issue his notorious decree of 10 September that the families of those who deserted to the enemy would be shot:

During August Himmler finally gained control of the V-weapons.¹⁴ According to General Dornberger, the head of the project at Peenemünde, Himmler had in September 1943 appointed S.S. Brigadier Dr Kammler, who was in charge of building projects for the S.S., to supervise any buildings needed for the development of the V-weapons. Kammler was there, says Dornberger, to act as a spy, and he is described as an energetic, Machiavellian figure, handsome and utterly without conscience. Kammler’s purpose was to supersede Dornberger as controller of the project, nominally taking over on behalf of Himmler. Dornberger worked under Fromm, the Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, and Himmler naturally saw his opportunity to take action after his appointment to succeed Fromm following the attempt on Hitler’s life. On 4 August he formally took over at Peenemünde and appointed Kammler his Special Commissioner in charge of the entire programme. The development of the secret weapons continued to be seriously retarded by the constant intrigue to which it had all along been subject.

Himmler’s second bid for power on the fighting front was won in the teeth of opposition from Guderian, Hitler’s new Chief of Staff, barely two weeks after the explosion at Rastenburg, when the Poles in Warsaw revolted on what seemed to be the eve of liberation by the Russians. As Guderian himself describes it: ‘I requested that Warsaw be included in the military zone of operation; but the ambitions of Governor-General Frank and the S.S. national leader Himmler prevailed with Hitler… The Reichsführer S.S. was made responsible for crushing the uprising… The battle which lasted for weeks was fought with great brutality.’¹⁵

Himmler sent S.S. Group-Leader von dem Bach-Zelewski with S.S. and police formations to fight in the streets of Warsaw, reinforced by the White Russian officer Kaminski and his S.S.brigade of some 6,500 Russian prisoners-of-war. These men were sent on the mission because their hatred of the Poles was well known. The Russians committed atrocities of such a nature that Guderian stated after the war that he had felt forced to persuade Hitler to withdraw them from Warsaw, while Bach-Zelewski claimed later that he had had Kaminski executed.¹⁶ Hitler, with memories of the revolt in the Ghetto during 1942, ordered Himmler to raze Warsaw to the ground, but the tragic and futile revolt continued until the beginning of October without any assistance from the Russian armies stationed on the Vistula, which flowed right through the heart of Warsaw. In his speech at Posen on 3 August, Himmler went so far as to praise the Kaminski brigade for its resource in looting German Army supplies that had been abandoned. Later, in the autumn, Himmler proposed that Budapest should be treated like Warsaw when the Russians were approaching the city. Himmler declared Budapest to be a centre of partisan warfare in order to keep the campaign within his jurisdiction and that of his favourite commander, Bach-Zelewski.

The use of these Russian forces did not in fact appeal to Himmler. He was bitterly hostile to the renegade Russian general Andrei Vlassov, who as a Ukrainian was ready to fight against Stalin. The Army was anxious to exploit this disillusioned Red general, who had been captured in the spring of 1942, and use him to recruit the Cossacks to fight against the Red Army. In April 1943 Vlassov became in effect the organizer of so-called Free Russian forces in Smolensk. Himmler was outraged. In his speech at Posen on 4 October he attacked Vlassov for his boasts that only Russians could defeat Russians and that he could muster an army of 650,000 deserters to fight alongside the Germans.¹⁷ Later, in the more informal but also more revealing talk he gave to the group of Gauleiters and senior officials at Posen on 25 May 1944, he described how Fegelein made fun of a Russian general by treating him as an equal and calling him ‘Herr General’, praising him until he had managed to get all the information he needed from him. ‘We were well aware of the Slav’s racial characteristic that he particularly likes to hear himself talk’, sneered Himmler:

After the attempt on Hitler’s life, Himmler commissioned Gunter d’Alquen, who was now Head of Army Propaganda, to organize the Russian deserters under Vlassov, but in the end only two divisions were formed in place of the twenty-five divisions of which Vlassov spoke, and the German Army kept its own Cossack divisions intact. Himmler was only induced to support Vlassov’s claim to be a Ukrainian de Gaulle because he was ready to claim jurisdiction over these Free Russian forces if ever they were brought up to full strength, incorporating them into the Waffen S.S. This, however, never happened. By the time Vlassov went into action Himmler was wholly absorbed in the task of survival. Vlassov was eventually captured by the Red Army and hanged.

With his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, Himmler also founded with Bormann the Volkssturm, the German Home Guard, which was to act as a civilian defence force in the case of invasion. This was followed in November by plans for the Werwolf,¹⁸ the future resistance force which Himmler hoped would operate if Germany were ever occupied. In so far as Himmler drew near to anyone, it was to Goebbels, whom Hitler had made Plenipotentiary for Total War when he had visited him to see the sacred bombed-site at the Wolf’s Lair. With the Army High Command in disgrace, the two men, one a life-long civilian and the other a chief of the secret police who had never commanded a platoon on the battlefield, planned to share out the war effort between them. Goebbels’s aide von Oven claims that Goebbels said in November, ‘The army for Himmler, and for me the civilian direction of the war! That is a combination which could rekindle the power of our war leadership.’¹⁹ Between them they planned the redistribution of German civilian labour and the recruitment of a million men, half of them from Göring’s Luftwaffe, who would be drafted and trained in the ranks of Himmler’s Reserve Army. In effect, Himmler became Minister of War, though Hitler did not grant him the title.²⁰ But he permitted him the particular honour of delivering the annual speech of Party commemoration in Munich on 9 November, which showed that in Hitler’s eyes Himmler was fully established in the forefront of the Nazi leadership.

Goebbels’s vicious ruthlessness in the exercise of power appealed to Himmler, whose nature craved for a similar measure of courage and decision. Once Goebbels had decided what he wanted, neither fear nor scruples deterred him. If von Oven is to be believed, Goebbels too was considering who best might govern Germany along with himself if Hitler were no longer in power — not Goring, certainly, who neglected his duties so shamefully; not Bormann, that second-rate climber, but Himmler? Here Goebbels paused before reaching the inevitable negative. Recently, he decided, Himmler had become too arbitrary (eigenwillig). But while treasonable thoughts were to nibble uneasily at Himmler’s conscience until the day Hitler died, they were firmly rejected by Goebbels, if they were ever entertained at all, as untenable. Goebbels realized what Himmler was incapable of grasping, that there could be no place at all for such a man as himself in a Germany without Hitler.

Himmler also managed to keep on what appear to be easy terms with Bormann, whom Guderian described as the ‘thick-set, heavyjointed, disagreeable, conceited and bad-mannered’ éminence grise of the Third Reich. Himmler’s mistress Hedwig, whose pet name was Häschen, had become friendly with Bormann’s wife, Gerda, the mother of their eight children and the apple of her husband’s sentimental eye. Himmler appears as ‘Uncle Heinrich’ in the letters Bormann dutifully sent home during this period, and Gerda writes in September to say how happy Häschen and her children Helge and Gertrud are in their new home in the Obersalzberg.²¹ Now that Häschen is a neighbour the older children can play together. ‘Helge is a lot taller than our Hartmut’, writes Gerda, ‘but much slimmer and thinner. In his movements and general build he is as much like Heinrich as Hartmut is like you, but I can’t see the facial likeness any more. The little girl, however, is ridiculously like her father. Häschen has some photos from Heinrich’s childhood where he looks exactly the same. The baby has grown big and sturdy, and is so sweet…’

In October we get a domestic glimpse of Himmler from Bormann: ‘Heinrich told me that yesterday he had been hanging pictures, doing things about the house, and playing with the children the whole day long. He didn’t accept any telephone calls either, but devoted himself quite comfortably to his family for once.’ According to Bormann: ‘Uncle Heinrich apparently is very pleased at the way Helge bosses everybody; he regards this as a sure sign of a leader of the future.’

Gerda sees Himmler and her husband as an affectionate team of disciples serving their master. ‘Oh, Daddy,’ she writes to Bormann at the end of September, ‘it doesn’t bear imagining what would happen if you and Heinrich didn’t see to everything. The Führer would never be able to do it all alone. So you two must keep well and take care of yourselves, because the Führer is Germany, but you are his selfless comrades-in-arms…’ Her view of these two men must remain unique in Nazi history, but Bormann’s terms of endearment for his wife (beloved mummy-girl, sweetheart mine, dearest heart, all-beloved) only encouraged her to dream of the roses round the door of Hitler’s headquarters, especially when he describes the fun he and Himmler have together in Berlin:

Other references to Himmler in Bormann’s letters home show the new-born general in action. On 3 September: ‘Heinrich H. drove to the West Wall yesterday; we are in daily communication by telephone. He is tackling his task of C.-in-C. of the Reserve Army with magnificent energy.’ Gerda sent Himmler an encouraging message through her husband. On 9 September: ‘I have told H.H., who telephones once a day, that you are glad to know he’s there, because you think this will solve the problem. It gladdened his heart, and he sends you his warmest regards…’ However, Hitler’s irregular hours of work did not suit Himmler. Bormann is amused: ‘Himmler is always quite shocked at our unhealthy way of living. He says he has to be in bed by midnight, at least as a rule. And we go on working till four in the morning, though we do stay in bed a little longer. But this is just the old, old story…’

Then, on 31 October, Bormann writes: ‘At my request, Uncle Heinrich is going to the Ruhr on 3 November … to put things in order.’

This forecast Himmler’s ineffectual intervention on the Western Front. On 10 December Hitler appointed him Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Rhine. The reason why he was ever appointed at all has been the subject of many and varied speculations. Guderian’s view is typical: the command was given at Bormann’s suggestion in order to ruin Himmler by putting him in a position which would expose his incompetence. Another view was that it was the only way to move Himmler’s Reserve Army to the battlefront. There is also the most obvious explanation, that Hitler thought this loyal and energetic man would be successful where the generals had failed. Hitler always distrusted the experts.

Strangely enough, the appointment deprived Himmler of immediate authority over the counter-offensive in the Ardennes planned by Hitler in October to be carried out by the S.S. General Sepp Dietrich, to whom Hitler gave the command of the Sixth Army, a special Panzer formation under Rundstedt, the Commander-in-Chief in the West. It has been suggested that Himmler’s command was given him in order to divert any attempts he might make to interfere with Dietrich’s strategy. Rundstedt was particularly sensitive to interference from Himmler, who had been tactless enough during one of his tours of inspection to send Rundstedt orders which he signed as ‘Supreme Commander in the West.’ As General Westphal, Rundstedt’s Chief of Staff, puts it, ‘Although we never discovered whether Hitler had in fact appointed him as such for a time, his rival authority was speedily eliminated.’²³

Sepp Dietrich’s S.S. Panzer Army was hardly what it sounded; one-third of his armoured divisions was recruited from the Peoples’ Grenadiers, another third from the Waffen S.S. The campaign was a failure, even though Skorzeny was brought in to form a special brigade operating directly under Himmler, who assumed his command in the west only a few days before the offensive. The Allies learned in advance that Skorzeny had been ordered to send Englishspeaking Germans dressed in Allied uniforms as spearheads behind the enemy lines. Skorzeny’s men penetrated far, wide and deep, but the effort was soon lost when Sepp Deitrich’s armour, which was bogged down in the winter countryside, failed to follow and support them. Himmler’s hastily improvised forces, their commanders including Bach-Zelewski of Warsaw, undertook little fighting. He attempted to take Strasbourg with his untried army and failed. He was rescued from this inglorious situation by being posted to the command of the Vistula Army Group in the east. He left on 23 January, taking Skorzeny with him. According to the scornful General Westphal, he left behind him ‘a laundry-basket full of unsorted orders and reports’.

Himmler had been based in the Black Forest. As Bormann put it in a letter to his wife: ‘he has his quarters — that is to say, his train — either in the vicinity of one of the Murgtal tunnels or near Triberg’. Hitler’s headquarters for the offensive were at Bad Nauheim 150 miles away, but Himmler kept in touch. On Christmas Eve he was present at a dinner party, sitting next to Guderian, a hostile critic, who noted that Himmler seemed to share Hitler’s delusions about the East:

This apparent lack of concern for the situation in which Germany was placed permeated those under the influence of Hitler, who seems to have spent his evenings looking at films while his staff entertained each other at parties. Himmler gave a reception for Rundstedt and Bormann on 29 December, after which his guests returned to their own quarters — some distance from Himmler’s — for ‘music, dancing and gaiety’. ‘I did not dance’, writes Bormann to his wife, ‘but you ought to have seen Jodl.’

Himmler nevertheless continued to watch over the self-discipline of those whose conduct he felt he should influence. In January he had written to Rauter, his representative in Holland: ‘I herewith order you to carry out your reprisal and anti-terror measures in the sharpest possible manner. Failure to do that would be the only misdemeanour you could possibly be guilty of. If there are complaints about your severity, that’s an honour to be proud of.’ In May 1944 he had written to Pancke, his Chief of Police in Denmark: ‘Will you please see to it that your wife adopts more modest and inconspicuous standards of living… I must ask you to educate your wife so that she refrains from trumpeting her personal opinions on this or that political event… I am not altogether convinced that, so far as your marriage is concerned, you have assumed leadership of your young wife to the extent I expect from a senior S.S. leader. Heil Hitler!’ In August he had sent a scathing signal to the Military Governor of Cracow: ‘I thoroughly disapprove of your orders which seem only concerned with evacuation. I demand supreme fortitude from all members of the administration. Getting your luggage away is supremely unimportant!’ When he himself was in trouble on the Western front, it did not prevent him writing a painful letter to S.S. General Höfle on 12 January, after deciding against sending a severe reprimand drafted on 30 December. His revised letter began: ‘According to my custom I have been brooding over a letter to you dictated more than a fortnight ago, and I have decided to write you a more personal letter instead, giving you one more chance.’ This letter ends: ‘Had I imagined how much this command that I confided to you exceeds your mental strength I would have spared both you and myself this grief.’

Letters and memoranda survive from Himmler’s files which show he must have been aware of the failure of the S.S. to commit the heroic self-sacrifice he wanted to impose on them. For example, an anonymous letter dated 14 January 1944 denounced the graft, fraud and theft in which many leading members of the S.S. indulged; the writer claimed he was an old man whose sons were all at the front and whose home was destroyed in the air-raids. The letter, which is plainly a serious one, lists about a dozen S.S. officers who were, the writer claims, betraying the Fatherland through their luxurious living. Ten days later, on 24 January, a senior S.S. officer writes to point out the folly of calling up men from the armament industry when the shortage at the front is not of men but munitions. On 16 February S.S. General Hofmann writes from Stuttgart to ask what is to be done with the surplus masses of foreign labour who have become a serious burden to the Reich now that the frontiers are contracting so rapidly and there is no work for them to do. Should they be abandoned to the enemy? There is no record of any reply to this letter.

On 23 February Himmler is himself writing to Bormann, whom he addresses as ‘Dear Martin’, about a report he has received from a young S.S. officer in Weimar, Wilhelm Vermöhlen, on the poor morale of leading Party members who have been the first to take flight.

Himmler’s appointment on the battlefront coincided with Hitler’s disastrous policy of giving both Goring and Himmler direct command over their respective Luftwaffe and S.S. fighting forces. The Army had no disciplinary power over these divisions, which reported to their own leaders. Only for tactical purposes did they come under the direction of the Army. Himmler, like Goring, was now free to intervene on matters of strategy and object to orders given by the Army Commanders in so far as these affected his own men.

According to Westphal, Himmler issued ‘a deluge of absolutely puerile orders’, but the professional soldiers were directed by Keitel to take note of Himmler’s ‘new methods of leadership’. Himmler was ‘hag-ridden by a pathological distrust’ and never hesitated to blame the Army for the failure of his own impractical orders because ‘he always felt he was being put at a disadvantage’. Westphal claims he was wasteful of supplies sent to him:

Himmler can scarcely be said to have approached his gravely responsible duties on the so-called Vistula front in a realistic spirit. Once more he was appointed in order to improvise, filling the vacuum left by Hitler’s spent forces in the face of the final Russian offensive. Guderian, as Chief of the General Staff, had, of course, opposed this unprofessional appointment, but Hitler had remained firm. As Guderian saw it: ‘This preposterous suggestion appalled me… Hitler maintained that Himmler had given a very good account of himself on the Upper Rhine. He also controlled the Reserve Army and therefore had a source of reinforcements immediately to hand… Hitler ordered that Himmler assemble his own staff…’²⁵

According to Guderian, Himmler surrounded himself with a staff of S.S. men utterly inexperienced for the task ahead of them. His headquarters were 150 miles north-east of Berlin at Deutsch-Krone, and he arrived on 24 January, passing German refugees on the road. The Russians had already over-run East Prussia and reached a line stretching south from Elbing on the Baltic to Thorn, Posen, the old German Army headquarters where Himmler had so often spoken, and Breslau. Northern Germany was at the mercy of the invading armies, and only fragmentary defences existed to stop their further advance.

Himmler’s knowledge was also fragmentary. According to Skorzeny, he ordered him to relieve a town barely thirty miles from Berlin and a hundred miles west of his own headquarters. Either Himmler had got the name wrong, or believed the Russian forces to be scattered over widely separated areas of Germany. The Russians were, in fact, waiting for the supplies their previous advances had outstripped, but they had already cut off the German forces in East Prussia, who were in urgent need of relief by Himmler’s army and were in only partial occupation of Posen, the German communication centre for the region. Himmler withdrew the garrisons at Thorn, Kulm and Marienwerder, which might, in favourable circumstances at least, have given him bridgeheads from which to relieve the men in East Prussia, and replaced the garrison commander in Posen with a diehard S.S. commander at the head of 2,000 officer cadets. He also placed police guards along the line of the River Oder to shoot soldiers seen deserting and put their bodies on display. When he tried to stage a limited local offensive from Deutsch-Krone in the direction of Schneidemuehl, his men were defeated, and he had to re-site his headquarters and withdraw his forces hastily a hundred miles west to the Oder, ordering the garrison commanders of the forces he left behind to be court-martialled if they abandoned their posts. In the north the Russian forces followed on his heels to establish bridgeheads as far east as the Oder. Himmler, on orders from Hitler, extended his defences dangerously along the fringe of the Baltic coast in order to hold as long as possible the U-boat bases that stretched as far distant as Elbing itself.

By 31 January Russian advance forces were beginning to threaten Berlin with spearhead advances from the line of the Oder, less than fifty miles away. Panic set in, but the Russian offensive in this sector came to a halt.

Himmler’s second headquarters on the Eastern front was at the luxurious villa owned by Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, near the S.S. Ordensburg Crössinsee at Falkenburg.²⁶ Here he lived, in effect, the life of a civil-servant who happened to be administering a war. He got up between eight and nine o‘clock, received treatment from Kersten if he were there or from Gebhardt, whose nursing home at Hohenlychen was in fact conveniently near. Between ten and eleven o’clock he received his war reports and took his decisions. After lunch he rested for a while, then conferred again with his staff officers. In the evening he was too tired to concentrate, and after dinner he went to bed. By ten o’clock he was inaccessible.

Hitler, oblivious of the threat to the capital, still planned his principal offensive in the south,²⁷ but Guderian was convinced that it was necessary to attack the Russian spearheads east of the capital immediately with all the force that could be assembled. He was also sure that Himmler was quite incapable of directing this action, which must be undertaken promptly and skilfully before the Russians had built up their strength for further advances.

Guderian determined to insist on his plan at a staff conference called by Hitler in the Chancellery in Berlin on 13 February. Himmler left his nursing home to be present and, as Guderian expected, opposed the offensive on the grounds that neither ammunition nor fuel could be made available in time. Guderian has recorded the conversation that followed in front of Himmler:

The dispute went on, according to Guderian, for two hours. Hitler became enraged:

Suddenly Hitler stopped short in front of Himmler and said: ‘Well, Himmler, General Wenck will arrive at your headquarters tonight and will take charge of the attack.’

Guderian had never seen Hitler rave so violently. The grim eyes of Bismarck in Lenbach’s portrait had stared down on the scene, and Guderian sensed the strength of the gaze from the bronze bust of Hindenburg which was standing behind him.

‘The General Staff has won a battle this day’, said Hitler, and suddenly gave one of his most charming smiles.

On the same day Himmler’s headquarters were moved once more, this time to the woods near Prenzlau, seventy miles north of Berlin and some thirty miles west of Stettin and the Russian front on the Oder. But Himmler returned to Hohenlychen, Gebhardt’s nursing home, which was some seventy miles north of Berlin, in a state of nervous collapse, addressing an absurd order of the day to his forces: ‘Forward through mud! Forward through snow! Forward by day! Forward by night! Forward to liberate our German soil!’²⁹ Wenck arrived on 16 February to direct the operations which began that same day, while Himmler summoned Skorzeny to the nursing home, and indulged in day-dreams about the imminent defeat of the Russians. According to Guderian, ‘His appreciation of our enemies was positively childish.’

But the offensive was doomed; Wenck broke his shoulder in a car accident while driving through the night to Berlin on 17 February to report to Hitler. On 20 February Bormann wrote to his wife: ‘Uncle Heinrich’s offensive did not succeed, that is to say it did not develop properly, and now the divisions which he was holding in reserve have to be put in on other sectors. It means constant improvisation from one day to the next.’ According to Guderian the attack, which had begun well enough under Wenck on 16 and 17 February, had lost its momentum by 18 February. The Russians regained their lost ground and inflicted heavy casualties on the German armoured divisions.

For a further month Himmler remained in his nominal command during a period involving heavy losses of territory in most sectors in the north-east and the south; the coastal bases were cut off or evacuated; meanwhile the endless, merciless bombing of Berlin continued every night. By the middle of March, the morale of the S.S. divisions in Hungary had collapsed, and they began to retreat against Hitler’s absolute orders. In his fury, Hitler demanded that the men of these divisions have their S.S. armbands stripped from them; one of the divisions to be so disgraced was the Leibstandarte, which had once formed his bodyguard. Himmler was ordered south to Hungary to supervise the dishonouring of the S.S.

But Himmler had for some weeks lived in a state bordering on collapse. His experiences as a general in the field subject to the raging pressures of Hitler’s fanatical command drove him back in March to his bed in Gebhardt’s nursing home, which became both his retreat and his headquarters. Wherever he went he could not escape the appalling dilemma of the Russian advances and Hitler’s hysterical reproaches. Like Goring, he could not stand the anger of the Führer; he did not have the strength of mind or purpose to oppose him. Like a terrified schoolboy, he retired to bed to escape the wrath of an authority that overwhelmed him. As Guderian saw it: ‘I was in a position on several occasions to observe his lack of selfassurance and courage in Hitler’s presence… His decisions when in command of Army Group Vistula were dictated by fear.’

In consequence of this, Himmler lost the regard of his armies over whom in Hitler’s name he endeavoured to establish a reign of terror. During the last days of German rule in Danzig, the trees of the Hindenburg-Allee became gibbets for the bodies of dead youths displayed with placards hung round their necks proclaiming, ‘I hang here because I left my unit without permission.’

On the main Oder front, immobile again for a brief while during the middle of March, the still massive armies of Hitler had little armour left with which to fight. Men press-ganged for the front had no equipment with which to repel the invader. Yet they were ordered to fight without thought of retreat, and the practice abandoned almost a century before of thrashing soldiers found guilty of cowardice was revived to curb the defeatism in Himmler’s improvised forces, which now included such irregular recruits as foreign conscripts, schoolboys, convicts, exiles from the Baltic, staff from aerodromes abandoned by the Luftwaffe, and old men drafted from the Home Guard.

It was Guderian, according to his own account, who finally managed to displace Himmler from his command, where he had ‘proved a complete failure’. No reports were sent in to Army headquarters, and in mid-March Guderian drove to Prenzlau to find out what was happening. He had the impression that the orders sent to Himmler were no longer carried out. When he arrived, Himmler was not there; Guderian was informed he was at Hohenlychen suffering from influenza.

‘Can’t you rid us of our commander’, begged General Heinz Lammerding, Himmler’s Chief-of-Staff.

This was what Guderian was determined to do. He drove straight to Hohenlychen, where he was surprised to find Himmler ‘apparently in robust health’, apart from a cold in the head. Guderian pointed out to him that he was obviously overworked as Reichsführer S.S., Head of the Reich Police, Minister of the Interior, Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army and Commander of the Army Group Vistula. Also, ‘he must have realized by now that a command of troops at the front is no easy matter’. He ought at least to give up his command in the east. Himmler hesitated.

‘I can’t go and say that to the Führer’, he said. ‘He wouldn’t approve of my making such a suggestion.’ Guderian saw his chance. ‘Then will you authorize me to say it for you?’ he demanded.³⁰

Himmler had to agree, and so lost his command on 20 March. According to Guderian, one of the principal reasons he had retained it, apart from ambition for office, was a desire to win for himself a Knight’s Cross.

Guderian had by now enjoyed the opportunity closely to observe Himmler’s character. He describes him as ‘the most impenetrable of all Hitler’s disciples’. He seemed ‘an inconspicuous man with all the marks of racial inferiority. The impression he made was one of simplicity. He went out of his way to be polite. In contrast to Goring, his private life might be described as positively spartan in its austerity.’ Yet he also seemed ‘like a man from some other planet’. His imagination was ‘vivid, and even fantastic … His attempt to educate the German people in National Socialism resulted only in the concentration camps.’ But Guderian sees fit to add that ‘the way the concentration camp methods were kept secret can only be described as masterly’.

The mask of resolution which Himmler chose to wear for the particular benefit of Hitler and the S.S. was dropped to a varying degree when he was faced by men equally determined to stop the war and save what life could be preserved before the final catastrophe. The concentration camps of the east were gradually falling into enemy hands, and Himmler was deeply disturbed by the conditions which the camps inside Germany would reveal should the Allied armies liberate them. Once the desperate task of stemming the Russian advance was removed from his hands by Guderian’s intervention, all that was left for him to do in his semi-retirement was to redeem his own personal situation as best he could. It was now that he came more fully under the influence of the peacemakers — Schellenberg, Kersten and the Swedish Count Bernadotte.

Bernadotte has left his own account of his dealings with Himmler from February to April 1945. He acted as a purely private ambassador on behalf of the International Red Cross. In his book The Fall of the Curtain he pays tribute to the devious Schellenberg, but never once makes reference to Kersten.³¹ Bernadotte was Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross and he had the distinction of being a relative of the King of Sweden. According to his own statement, he was anxious to intervene largely to rescue from the holocaust of Germany several thousand Scandinavian prisoners of war and a group of Scandinavian women who, although German by marriage, had been widowed during the war and wanted desperately to return to their native lands. Bernadotte was led, either through vanity or illusion, to represent himself in the light of a great saviour and peace-maker fearlessly challenging the leaders of Nazi Germany, and more especially Himmler. That he failed altogether to acknowledge the groundwork achieved in earlier and more difficult times by Kersten is a deliberate omission, and throws some suspicion on his assessment of his personal achievements during the last weeks of the regime.

Kersten, as we have seen, had managed to move his family to Stockholm in September 1943, and, once there, had inspired the tentative peace discussions which Schellenberg had undertaken with Abram Stevens Hewitt, Roosevelt’s special representative who was on a visit to Stockholm. He also initiated the first stage of the plan to evacuate Swedes and other Scandinavians who were prisoners of war from German-occupied territory, a plan on which he worked with the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christian Günther. Kersten was also working for the release of Dutch, French and Jewish prisoners. Moving constantly between Sweden and Germany, Kersten had worked on Himmler’s conscience with the same assiduous care with which he massaged his body. The initial proposal was that while neutral Swedes might be released, the Norwegian and Danish men and women in the concentration camps should be sent for internment in Sweden.

During the summer of 1944, Kersten had managed to persuade Himmler to consider placing the Scandinavian prisoners in camps where they would be free from the worst bombing and could receive help from the Swedish Red Cross. He also joined with Madame Immfeld to urge the release of 20,000 Jews for internment by the Swiss. In December, when Kersten was attending Himmler on his train in the Black Forest, the Reichsführer had gone further and agreed to release 1,000 Dutch women, together with Norwegian and Danish women and children and certain male prisoners, provided Sweden would organize the transport. He also agreed to transfer to Switzerland 800 French women, 400 Belgians, 500 Polish women and between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews. Before his return to Stockholm on 22 December, Kersten had written a letter confirming the arrangement and explaining that he had discussed the details with Kaltenbrunner in Berlin. He had also implored Himmler to release the Jewish prisoners to the Swiss.

As we have seen, Himmler had begun to transfer some groups of Jews to Switzerland when further evacuations were stopped by Hitler’s orders on 6 February. Before this, Himmler had even been negotiating with the Swiss for placing the concentration camps under International Red Cross inspection; Red Cross officials had visited Oranienburg on 2 February. But Hitler’s anger was always too much for Himmler; he collapsed like a spent balloon. After the fright he had received on 6 February, he retreated to Hohenlychen as the most peaceful place from which to conduct the military campaign in the east, which at that time was still nominally in his hands.

At Hohenlychen he received a number of important guests. On 14 February, the day after Himmler’s humiliation by Guderian in front of the Führer in Berlin, Goebbels arrived in Hohenlychen, having driven through the columns of German refugees from the east in order to visit the Reichsführer who, he gathered, was ill with tonsillitis. Semmler, Goebbels’s aide records Goebbels’s private remarks during this period about the man who seemed nearest to him now among the Nazi leaders.

The following day it was Ribbentrop who made contact with Himmler, and probably came to see him at Hohenlychen; Himmler apparently gave his approval to Ribbentrop’s plan to send Fritz Hesse to Stockholm on a fruitless peace mission. Hesse left on 17 February, the day after Bernadotte arrived on his mission to Germany.

Bernadotte’s principal intention was to visit Himmler and take over the various negotiations initiated by Kersten, whom he appears to have regarded as an interloper. On 18 February³³ Bernadotte had his first meeting with Himmler at Hohenlychen after he had formally visited both Kaltenbrunner and Ribbentrop, whose lengthy speeches during the interview he secretly timed with a stop-watch. Ribbentrop’s foreign policy, he observed, seemed to favour some kind of agreement with Stalin for the joint domination of Europe by the U.S.S.R. and Germany — the reverse, that is, of the policy Schellenberg and Kersten were advocating to Himmler, which aimed at linking Germany and the Western Allies in combined opposition to further encroachments by the Red Army into Western Europe. Accompanied by Schellenberg, Bernadotte drove to Hohenlychen, which he discovered to be filled with German refugees from the east. Contrary to what he had expected, he found Himmler in a lively mood. He was dressed in the green uniform of the Waffen S.S. and wore hornrimmed spectacles instead of the pince-nez which Bernadotte had seen in so many portraits of the Reichsführer. Bernadotte’s description of Himmler is of particular interest:

When Bernadotte, who was aware of Himmler’s interest in the Scandinavian countries, gave him a seventeenth-century Swedish book on Scandinavian runic inscriptions, he ‘seemed noticeably affected’.

Bernadotte’s specific request was for the release of some thousands of Norwegian and Danish prisoners for internment in Sweden; this Himmler refused, but agreed they should be moved to two specific camps, where they might be cared for by the Swedish Red Cross. He even agreed, after a discursive conversation about the dangers to Europe of a Russian victory, that ‘if the necessity should arise, he would allow interned Jews to be handed over to the Allied military authorities’. When they parted, he asked Schellenberg for an assurance that a good driver had been obtained to take Bernadotte back to Berlin. ‘Otherwise’, he added, ‘it might happen that the Swedish papers would announce in big headlines: War Criminal Himmler murders Count Bernadotte.’

According to Schellenberg, Himmler was annoyed by this intrusion into the negotiations which he wanted to keep as secret as possible. The fact that Bernadotte’s visit was known officially to Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner meant that Hitler also would know of it; however, he decided to put the whole matter on an official basis and instructed both Kaltenbrunner and Fegelein, his official representative at Hitler’s headquarters, to sound Hitler on the matter. Fegelein reported Hitler as saying: ‘You can’t get anywhere with this sort of nonsense in total war.’ Schellenberg, anxious as ever to put himself in the picture, claims to have advised Bernadotte on the journey out to Hohenlychen to compromise about the Danish and Norwegian prisoners and ask for their removal to a central camp in the north-west by Swedish Red Cross transport rather than their extradition to Sweden for internment. After the interview, he claims that Himmler ‘had been very favourably impressed’ by the Count, and wanted to maintain close contact with him. No doubt he was encouraged to seize this new lifeline to the future by the failure of the attack on the Russians which had just been carried out in his name by Guderian’s nominees.

A week later, Himmler ventured as far as Berlin to attend a reception given by Goebbels at his Ministry. They talked about peace negotiations, but Goebbels had renewed his faith in Hitler and refused to think of such things without the active support of Hitler himself. He even suggested that if such action were ever taken by the Führer, he would much prefer to look to Stalin in the east than the Allies in the west. ‘Madness,’ murmured Himmler, and walked away.³⁴ Goebbels was preparing for his role as the stonewall defender of Berlin, the man who with his wife and children was to lay down his life for the Führer.

Kersten returned to Germany from Stockholm on 3 March after further consultations with Günther, the Swedish Foreign Minister, who feared that the Allies would force Sweden to break her neutrality and enter the war if Germany did not withdraw from Norway. He had also met Hilel Storch in Stockholm on 25 February. Storch was one of the leading men in the World Jewish Congress in New York, and he was anxious to use every possible means to secure the safety and the release of the remaining Jews imprisoned in Germany. He knew of Hitler’s orders, that both the prisoners and the camps should be destroyed rather than let them be liberated by the Allies. Kersten undertook to negotiate directly with Himmler for the relief of the Jews by the International Red Cross.

He began his new talks with Himmler on 5 March. ‘He was in a highly nervous condition,’ writes Kersten, ‘negotiations were difficult and stormy.’

During the following days Kersten fought to rouse Himmler’s conscience and the remnants of his humanity. Schellenberg did the same: ‘I wrestled for his soul’, he said. ‘I begged him to avail himself of the good offices of Sweden… I suggested that he should ask Count Bernadotte to fly to General Eisenhower and transmit to him his offer of capitulation.’ According to Schellenberg, Himmler gave in and agreed that Schellenberg should continue his sessions with Bernadotte, whom he was unwilling at this stage to meet himself because of his fear of Hitler and of the leadership group in Berlin, who he knew were hostile and had by now an easier access to the Führer than he had himself.

On the same day that Kersten began his desperate discussions with Himmler, Bernadotte arrived from Sweden to make final arrangements for the transportation of the Danish and Norwegian prisoners from camps all over Germany to a central camp at Neuenburg. These negotiations were conducted with Kaltenbrunner and Schellenberg. Difficulties developed on both sides. Bernadotte claims he had overcome Kaltenbrunner’s point blank refusal to co-operate. On the other hand, according to Professor Trevor-Roper, Bernadotte himself refused point-blank to accept non-Scandinavian prisoners on the Swedish transport, and wrote to Himmler accordingly.³⁵ The matter had to be straightened out by Günther and Kersten, and the transportation took place during the last two weeks of March. Meanwhile, Kersten negotiated a further agreement with Himmler of the greatest importance, again working together with Günther. This agreement was signed by Himmler on 12 March, and in it the Reichsführer S.S. undertook to disregard Hitler’s orders that concentration camps were to be blown up before the arrival of Allied forces. He agreed to surrender them intact with their prisoners still alive, and to stop all further execution of Jews.

In making this decision, Himmler was no doubt influenced by his discovery on 10 March that a typhus epidemic had broken out in the huge camp at Belsen. The news had been kept from him by Kaltenbrunner, according to Kersten, who at once made use of this new threat to Germany to increase his pressure on Himmler. ‘I pointed out that he could not in any circumstances permit this camp to become a plague centre which would imperil all Germany.’ He sent orders at once to Kaltenbrunner in which, guided by Kersten, he demanded that drastic measures be taken to stamp out the epidemic. On 19 March Himmler sent further written orders to Kramer, the commandant of Belsen, saying that ‘not another Jew’ was to be killed and the death rate at the camp, which by now had some 60,000 prisoners, must be reduced at all costs. The state of Belsen was so appalling that even Hoess when he visited the camp was shocked at the sight of so many thousands of dead.

Kersten, who was to leave Germany for Stockholm on 22 March, had now worked Himmler into a pliant mood. In his very full diary for this period, written mainly at Hartzwalde, his old residence near Berlin, Kersten claims that he had managed to persuade Himmler to agree that there should be no fighting in Scandinavia, and also to countermand Hitler’s order that The Hague and other Dutch cities were to be blown up by means of V-2 rockets on the approach of the Allied armies, together with the Zuyder Zee dam. On 14 March Himmler had almost reluctantly signed the order that the cities and the dam were to be spared.

‘Once we had good intentions towards Holland’, said Himmler. ‘For us Germanic peoples are not enemies to be destroyed… The Dutch have learnt nothing from history… They could have helped us and we could have helped them. They have done everything to undermine our victory over Bolshevism.’

Himmler also finally agreed on 17 March, the day before Guderian arrived at Hohenlychen and persuaded him to resign his army command, that he would meet in the strictest secrecy a representative of the World Jewish Congress at Hartzwalde. Kersten suggested that Storch should come to Germany, provided Himmler would guarantee his personal safety.

‘Nothing will happen to Herr Storch’, said Himmler. ‘I pledge my honour and my life on that.’

Kersten, as before, was careful to write Himmler a letter confirming everything that the Reichsführer S.S. had promised to do. Himmler, in his turn, sent an invitation to Storch in which he tried to make out that he had always from the start wanted to draft a helpful and humane approach to the Jewish problem, and had in fact shown his good intentions in recent weeks. He also confirmed his agreements with Kersten in writing, through his secretary Brandt.

On 22 March, the day Kersten flew back to Stockholm to report his various successes to Günther, Himmler received his successor on the battlefront, General Gotthard Heinrici, at Prenzlau, his military headquarters. He had thought fit the previous day to venture seeing Hitler in Berlin, and Guderian saw him walking with the Führer among the rubble in the Chancellery garden. Afterwards Guderian had told him that in his view the war was lost and the wasteful slaughter of men should be stopped at once.

‘Go with me to Hitler and urge him to arrange an armistice’, Guderian demanded.

This was too much for Himmler.

‘My dear Colonel-General’, said Himmler very precisely. ‘It is still too early for that.’ Guderian was disgusted. He could get no further with Himmler, however much he argued. ‘There was nothing to be done with the man’, he says in his memoirs. ‘He was afraid of Hitler.’

On 22 March Himmler’s last act as a soldier was to assemble both his chiefs of staff and his stenographers at Prenzlau and dictate in the presence of Heinrici his summary of what had happened during the period of his command. As he went on talking, this grandiloquent scene of farewell became increasingly absurd. Heinrici’s professional opinion was that ‘in four months Himmler had failed to grasp the basic elements of generalship’. After two hours’ dictation he became so incoherent that the stenographers could no longer make sense of what he had said and, together with the staff officers, they excused themselves from further work. Heinrici, impatient to get to the front, was finally released from this ordeal by the telephone: General Busse, one of the commanders in the field, was in grave difficulties and wanted to report to his Commander-in-Chief. Himmler straightaway handed the receiver to Heinrici.

‘You are in command now’, he said. ‘You give him the necessary orders.’³⁶

Before the meeting broke up, Heinrici, like Guderian, tried to sound Himmler on the possibilities of initiating peace negotiations with the Western Allies. Himmler tried to sound inconclusive, but admitted cautiously that he had caused certain steps to be taken.

In the chaos of the last month of the war, many men were salving their consciences by attempting to conduct negotiations with the Allies which might, once the war was over, present them in a more favourable light. Among these was General Wolff, who had been Himmler’s liaison officer at Hitler’s headquarters until 1943, when he was appointed Military Governor in Northern Italy. Early in March he went to Switzerland and attempted through Allen Dulles to negotiate the surrender of German forces in Italy. However, he failed to meet the emissaries sent by General Alexander to Zurich to discuss terms with him because he dared not admit to Himmler the full nature of his self-appointed mission. He pretended that his sole interest in holding these meetings lay in the exchange of prisoners, a matter which Himmler declared was the concern of Kaltenbrunner. For the moment there was stalemate, but Wolff was only waiting his chance to challenge Kaltenbrunner’s growing authority and act again on his own behalf.

It is often difficult to make any sense of the rival negotiations that were taking place behind Hitler’s back from motives which were a mixture of desperation and self-interest. According to the evidence given at the Nuremberg Trial by Baldur von Schirach, who was the Nazi Gauleiter of Vienna during the war, Himmler came to Vienna at the end of March to organize the evacuation of Jews from Vienna to the camps at Linz and Mauthausen.

‘I want the Jews now employed in industry’, Schirach reported him to have said, ‘to be taken by boat or by bus, if possible, under the most favourable conditions and with the best medical care to Linz or Mauthausen. Please take every care of these Jews. They are my soundest capital investment.’ Schirach gained the impression that Himmler wanted to ‘redeem himself with this good treatment of the Jews’.³⁷ It seems, however, that such Jews as survived were in fact marched on foot to Mauthausen.

During the first part of April Himmler was frequently at Hohenlychen, and it was here on 2 April that he met Bernadotte for the second time, along with Schellenberg. Himmler appeared nervous and depressed, but he insisted that the war must still go on. He agreed, however, to the partial release of the Scandinavian prisoners, though he said they were not to be released all at once because, as he put it, ‘it would attract too much attention’. Himmler seemed to be almost completely under the distant control of Hitler, but later he sent messages through Schellenberg that, should Hitler’s position change, he hoped Bernadotte would get in touch with Allied headquarters on his behalf. Bernadotte warned Schellenberg to get rid of any illusions either he or Himmler might have that the Allies would ever enter into negotiations with the head of the S.S., the man whom the world regarded as a mass murderer.

Goebbels realized by the beginning of April that the concentration camps were the worst evidence possible for the Allies to discover. ‘I fear that the concentration camps have grown a bit above Himmler’s head’, he said, and von Oven duly wrote down this observation: ‘Just suppose that these camps should be overrun by the enemy in their present condition. What an outcry will be heard.’ It was in fact during April that the first contingent of Allied soldiers liberated Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau. Himmler believed he had acted with exemplary humanity in allowing these camps, in which conditions had never been worse, to be entered by the Allies without their inhabitants first being blown up in the blockhouses where they lay. The massed overcrowding left both the guards and their prisoners equally helpless to relieve the barest needs of the dying. An appalling, hopeless state of inertia faced the Allied units entering these camps and seeing for the first time what man in the twentieth century could do to man in the name of racial purity. The first British entered Belsen on 15 April, after arranging a truce with the S.S. guards three days before. According to Schellenberg, Kaltenbrunner had ordered the wholesale evacuation of Buchenwald which began, probably without Himmler’s knowledge, on 3 April; Himmler, says Schellenberg, stopped the evacuation on 10 April as soon as he learned of it from the son of the Swiss President, Jean-Marie Musi, to whom on 7 April he had given his word that Buchenwald should be left intact for the Allied liberation, a promise intended to impress General Eisenhower in Himmler’s favour.

Himmler was still nominally a soldier, commander of the Waffen S.S. and Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, though in the turmoil of these last weeks such troops as there were left in action came under the direct orders of Hitler. Nevertheless, Himmler saw fit to issue a stern order dated 12 April decreeing the death penalty for commanders who failed to hold the towns for which they were responsible. ‘Battle commanders appointed for each town are personally held responsible for compliance with this order. Neglect of this duty by the battle commander, or the attempt on the part of any civil servant to induce such neglect, is punishable by death.’³⁸

Kersten meanwhile had been waiting in Stockholm expecting to receive the formal permit for Storch to visit Germany. Bernadotte returned on 10 April, bringing with him a letter for Kersten from Brandt which, although no date was fixed for the appointment, revealed that Himmler had not forgotten his promises. He was, in fact, still very uneasy about the project. On 13 April he said to Schellenberg: ‘How am I going to do that with Kaltenbrunner about? I shall be completely at his mercy.’ This was one of the occasions when Schellenberg had to wrestle for Himmler’s soul; secret arrangements had been made with Professor de Crinis for a detailed report from Hitler’s doctor on the Fuhrer’s state of health, but this had not yet arrived to help or hinder the Reichsführer S.S. in making up his mind. Himmler took Schellenberg for a walk in the forest near the country house in Wustrow where he was staying, and unburdened himself of his worries:

‘Schellenberg,’ he said, ‘I believe that nothing more can be done with Hitler.’

‘Everything he has done lately’, urged Schellenberg, ‘seems to show that now is the time for you to act.’

Schellenberg goes on to describe their conversation:

Eventually Himmler took Schellenberg’s advice and arranged a date for Storch to come to Germany on 19 April, during a period when Kaltenbrunner was known to be going to Austria. The message reached Kersten on 17 April, but by this time Storch was unable to go to Germany. He delegated the formidable task of being the first Jew to negotiate direct with Himmler on more or less equal terms to Norbert Masur, director of the Swedish section of the World Jewish Congress in New York. He was to travel incognito in the care of Kersten. On 19 April they flew by the regular service to Tempelhof airport, the only passengers on a plane full of Red Cross parcels. When they arrived, an S.S. guard stood ready to receive them; the S.S. clicked their heels and cried, ‘Heil Hitler’, but Masur calmly raised his hat to them and said, ‘Good evening’. They then drove to Hartzwalde in an S.S. staff car to wait for Himmler, who had spent the day in Berlin conferring with Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Minister of Finance, an interview at the Count’s house arranged by Schellenberg because he hoped the Minister might influence Himmler to take the action they all wanted him to take, ‘with or without Hitler’.³⁹

Himmler could not meet Masur on 20 April because it was Hitler’s birthday. He sent Schellenberg to Hartzwalde during the night of the 19th to prepare the ground for their conversations, which he was ready to begin the moment the birthday celebrations were over. Himmler, according to Schellenberg, had ordered champagne with which to toast the Führer.

But 20 April was no day for celebrations. By now, the Americans were across the Elbe and in Nuremberg; British patrols were approaching Berlin from the west and the full Russian forces were marching in from the east. The American and Russian armies were almost on the point of meeting. Hitler decided to receive his guests in the great Bunker constructed fifty feet under the Chancellery buildings and extending out under the garden. Although Himmler, against Schellenberg’s advice, had decided he had better appear and shake Hitler by the hand, he was not invited to confer in private with the Führer along with the service chiefs. Relations were cold by now. He lined up with the rest below ground to congratulate the man he had served as Reichsführer S.S. for fifteen years. Goring, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Speer were there; so were Doenitz, Keitel and Jodl, all under the watchful eyes of Bormann. It was expected Hitler would now move south and head the great German Resistance which was due to be organized from the Obersalzberg; Himmler joined with the others in urging him to do so. But Hitler reserved his decision, only declaring that if Germany should be cut in two by the forward drive of the armies from the east and the west, then Doenitz should take charge of the defences in the north. The narrow escape route to the south was still open, and once the conference was over the great dispersal took place. Goring travelling with a fleet of cars departed importantly for the safety of Obersalzberg; Speer hurried to Hamburg intent on preserving as much of German industry from destruction as possible; Ribbentrop still hung around Berlin, his advice no longer wanted. Only Goebbels and Bormann remained fast by the side of Hitler, waiting for his decision whether they were to stay and die in Berlin or escape to the south and fight a while longer for survival.

Himmler said goodbye and set off for Wustrow, where Schellenberg was anxiously waiting for him. He was never to see Hitler again.